


in thy dark streets shineth

by bloodbright



Category: Famous Blue Raincoat (Song)
Genre: Fantasy elements, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-20
Updated: 2015-12-20
Packaged: 2018-05-07 20:44:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,156
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5470253
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bloodbright/pseuds/bloodbright
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s cold here, but nothing like the way it was near the end—the endless mud, and the way it would freeze solid at night and melt to dirty slush in the day, and the sky always grey, and all of us eternally damp; those tents that barely kept the wind out, and your shoulder against mine, and if there had been room I might’ve swallowed my pride and crawled inside your coat with you.</p>
            </blockquote>





	in thy dark streets shineth

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Talullah](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Talullah/gifts).



It’s late in the year. I woke up early this morning and lay there for a while, watching the sky lighten from darkness to grey to white, low and heavy with the promise of snow. Jane was coughing in the other room; the winter isn’t kind to her lungs. She says she doesn’t want to disturb me, but the bed is terribly empty without her.

It’s cold here, but nothing like the way it was near the end—the endless mud, and the way it would freeze solid at night and melt to dirty slush in the day, and the sky always grey, and all of us eternally damp; those tents that barely kept the wind out, and your shoulder against mine, and if there had been room I might’ve swallowed my pride and crawled inside your coat with you.

We fought for the fate of the world, then; these days the only thing I fight is a losing battle against the mice in the kitchen, while Jane fights for air. She went to the free clinic they run out of a truck the first Saturday every month. They gave her an inhaler. It doesn’t do anything.

I still remember the light pouring golden through her, her eyes ablaze, already gone beyond reach: breathing in power, breathing out life. Sometimes I still see the burning afterimage of that fiery halo when I look at her.

Jane tells me they rang the bells after, in every town square, as new life rolled across the land. I don’t think I’ll ever see it.

I could. Sometimes I think about opening that door again. They sent me a message, a couple months after I woke up, when I still had to stop and rest halfway through limping to the door to open it; they asked me to come back. I told them to go fuck themselves.

I’m not so angry any more. But after all of that, after all this time, I never expected you to show up at my door.

\----

Afternoon: the sky turns dark and opens up, pelting sleet hard enough to rattle the windows. Not weather anyone should be out in. So it’s a surprise when there’s a knock, and I open the door, and there you are.

“Hi,” you say, smiling.

“Hi,” I say automatically, “come in,” instead of the thousand things warring to spill out of my mouth. 

“Thank you,” you say, very carefully, and pause a moment there, your small neat hand on the doorframe. Your long blue coat is soaked, your shoulders held rigid; as I watch, one convulsive shiver wracks your body before you force it back into stillness.

That’s enough to get me moving. “Come in,” I say again, and then, “Leave your boots in the hall. You need to get out of those wet clothes.”

You open your mouth to say something, and then snap it shut again when your teeth take the opportunity to chatter.

“The bathroom’s right there. You can just toss your clothes outside the door,” I say. “There’s towels on the rack over the toilet.”

“Thank you,” you say again, one corner of your mouth curving down wryly, and a moment later the door closes and I can hear the shower running.

I’ve never been good at this; it was always Jane who knew how to be briskly efficient, you who knew how to make people momentarily forget that they’d just lost everything. But I can find clean sweats for you, and make tea, and pace around the kitchen until my hip twinges and I have to abruptly sit down.

The bathroom is directly off the kitchen, which means that I’m right there when you finally emerge in a cloud of steam, a towel wrapped around you.

Your eyes flit around the room. We slept in palaces, once, in another world, under canopies of silk and velvet, the gilded ceiling disappearing into gloomy heights, and palace or tent you were always perfectly at home, perfectly at ease. Now Jane and I share an apartment that’s little more than a long hallway divided into rooms, dust gathering in the corners and the kitchen table piled high with junk mail and newspapers two weeks old, paint flaking off the ancient radiator.

And then you turn your eyes on me, sitting here with my cane close to hand, watching you take it in. You always saw more than the rest of us; the wonder is that now suddenly I can see you, when I always thought you were so mysterious; and somehow I’ve managed to forget what it felt like just to be in the same room with you, the electric shock of it despite myself when you turned your full attention on me.

“It’s good to see you,” you say, with that same disarming directness. I used to think it was a trick, that somewhere behind your eyes you were mocking me; now I know that it’s just you, ever brave.

“You too,” I say, and find that it’s true. “Here.” You take the clothes from me and disappear into the bathroom again, reemerging with the too-long sweats pooling around your ankles.

“For what it’s worth, I’m sorry,” you say.

“For what?” I say, even though I know exactly what, even though I’ve spent so long obsessing over it. Maybe I just want to hear you say it.

“Jane,” you say. “And beating you. And, um, stabbing you a little.”

“A little,” I say. “You stabbed me a lot.”

“I stabbed you once,” you protest, but you’re laughing, and I’m smiling, too, even as I say, “You stabbed me very thoroughly.”

You make a face—still handsome, even with the scar pulling the corner of your eye down. “I’m sorry,” you say again.

I want to ask where you’ve been, what happened, why you’re here—if you’re here for Jane—but you’re listing a little to one side, your eyelids drooping.

“You should sleep,” I say. “You can take my bed. We can talk when you wake up.”

Maybe I shouldn’t, but I do: when you’re asleep, I come in to look at you in my bed.

Your body is still familiar, any pretense of modesty long since discarded after so much time spent in close quarters. I remember this: your narrow shoulders and narrow hips, the fine bones of your hands, the sleek muscle of your back; the shadows smudged under your eyes that never went away. You never seemed to sleep; that was the only sign it affected you.

It’s easier to look at your face like this without steeling myself not to flinch, not to look away. What I’d thought was just the heat of the shower is instead a hectic flush lingering in your cheeks; I can feel the heat radiating from your skin.

I almost touch your outflung hand, the joints over-prominent, all the tendons standing out like the hand of someone fifty years older. There’s a pulse of something like light—something like a tracery of fire—moving under your skin. The flesh looks papery, too hot, too thin to contain what beats angrily beneath it, the muscles nearly wasted away.

I’d thought—Jane and I, we were the only ones. And then you showed up, with your eyes and your certainty, your blazing determination, and Jane—

We’d all been weighed down with weariness slowly curdling to despair for so long that we’d forgotten there was any other way to be. But after you came she was lighter; and what you brought her wasn’t hope but clarity, a purpose bright enough for her to let everything else fall away. And I remember listening to you laughing with her, one of the last nights before the end, and the light glowing through the tent you shared; your silhouette as you leaned in—

I thought about that moment, all unbidden, when we came to the worm gnawing at the heart of the world and found that there was only one way to win.

You cut it out of me first. Jane told me you burned it out of yourself.

I leave you there. Hours pass. I settle into the chair in the corner and wait, and when you begin to stir I go to get a cup of tea and leave it on the nightstand.

And then you wake, and you smile, and it’s the sweetest thing I’ve seen in a long time.

“You don’t look well,” is what I say.

“You aren’t supposed to actually say that,” you say. “Weren’t you the one who got all the etiquette lessons? Anyway, it’s nothing.”

“It’s not nothing,” I say.

“I don’t regret anything,” you say. “I was sorry it had to be done, but I would do it again a thousand times and count it cheap to see you like this.”

Like this, you say, and I realize that you aren’t seeing the dirt permanently ground into the window frame or the mysterious stain on the ceiling, the battered furniture or the cane I’m leaning on, but just me, standing upright in the warmth of my own home. Your eyes are intent on my face, like you’re drinking it in, like you’re storing it up against the darkness to come. I don’t think anyone has ever looked at me like that before.

I was so afraid, then. Afraid and angry with it, afraid of losing and afraid of losing Jane, angry at you for being so good and angry that I was grateful you were there; and beneath it all, most bitterly, most shamefully, afraid to die. If you were afraid you never showed it, not even at the end.

You reach for the teacup. Your hand trembles under that tiny weight, a violent tremor that splashes tea onto the saucer, and you set the cup down too hard, lips pressed determinedly together.

Jane told me you’d survived. I’d thought—sweating, straining, teeth clenched to keep from screaming just limping from bed to kitchen—that of course you had, that you’d found some clever way to wriggle out of it like always. But now I know: it was I who paid the least for our victory.

“Come on,” I say. “If you’re ready to get up, I have something to show you.”

The sleet has stopped. I give you my coat, a scarf, a hat to pull down over your bright hair, still slightly damp, and you smile up at me from under it.

Outside the sky is finally clear, a brave handful of stars struggling against the city lights. We bow our heads into the wind, here in that strange time suspended between Christmas and the new year. The solstice is past, and with it the longest night, though it will be long and long before we see the days lengthen again.

It’s not far to the church. The doors are closed, but when I push on them they’re unlocked. Theres’s no one inside; the evening service is long over, everyone gone home.

Inside all the noise of the city is muffled. The floor is worn dark and smooth with age, the vaulted ceiling soaring above, and the stained glass is still beautiful, though now the colors are dull, the starlight too weak to bring them alive.

The last pew will do. I sit there with you beside me, and breathe in the scent of incense and age, and wait. 

I’ll tell you the truth: it took me a long time to remember, afterward. Sometimes I dream of it, now, and everything is so clear: staring down the blade at you and choking on my own blood; and your face, pale but determined, your mouth firm, the smudge of dirt on your forehead, the cut on your cheek that I put there.

Your hand touches mine.

\----

They called us to another world, the priests in their miters and vestments, in their gleaming domed temples. They brought us before them, confused and afraid, and they said: the gods have set you a task.

And so I believed. I used to lie awake at night in palaces and in tents, naming the gods, shaping their thousand names with my lips in the darkness. I prayed, and then I demanded, and then stained with blood and shaken with fear I begged, and found only silence.

They told us we were chosen; they told us we were destined for glory. Now I know what glory means: Jane incandescent with power fit to remake the world, and the thin terrible wheeze in the cough that wracks her whole body; the light in your eyes and your body withering away; and me on my knees in the mud.

There’s still no answer, but I don’t expect one any more. Beneath the high vaulted arches there is a vast stillness, a vast waiting, a great expectation that remains. There is still something left to come.

Listen: the bells are ringing.


End file.
